About a month ago my team mates and I had our first evaluations. Two Church Planting consultants, Brooks and Eric came out to Pei for 4 days to encourage us and test our language skills! Everything started great and then the morning we were supposed to begin our evaluations we heard a tribal man had died the night before. We were all saddened by the news but not surprised. This man had been sick for a while and we knew he could pass at any time. Even though we were sad we knew that we wanted to continue with the evals because it would be a long time before we’d be able to get these guys in here again. Before we started Justin and Chris spent a few hours in the village with some of the big men to talk over what our game plan would be. All our tribal guys agreed that we should go through with our evals but that we should go to the top of the village so we wouldn’t disturb all the people who wanted to mourn.
Since most people here in PNG are driven by the spirit world there weren’t a lot of people raring to come to the top of the village to help. When someone dies here people wail and cry and walk around sad for at least a week… if they don’t the spirit of that man or woman may come back to get them. The more you grieve and mourn (whether its genuine or not) the better.
Everything ended up working out but nothing really went the way we had planned it. My language helper whom I had asked weeks before to help me ended up leaving the morning of my eval to go spread the word to another village. I ended up taking my test with another girl who really ended up coming through for me. Another thing we hadn’t planned for were the flood waters 🙂 The morning of our evaluations the water began to down the village and by the 2nd day the water was waist deep. I think the Lord was really trying to teach us what it means to be flexible when plans fall through and what it means to trust him in the midst of chaos. The past year and a half has been one big lesson in flexibility… plans can change in a second, time isn’t valued like it is in the states and you really can’t count on anyone. It’s just the reality of living in this culture and even though I don’t always like it I’m learning to trust the Lord like never before!
Even though things were a little crazy we all ended up doing great on our evals. We sent our consultants back feeling encouraged and prepared to work hard in the next 6 months so we can continue to progress in this language!
This is a picture of consultant Brooks and my Co-worker Chris wading through waist deep water to begin an eval!